Inertia and Setting Things Right

Image by Magdalena Kulczyk from Pixabay

 There is a piece of artwork on the wall in my family room that has been crooked for weeks now. I see it every night when I watch television, and yet have not managed to take the ten seconds it will take to correct it. In part this is because while the act itself will take ten seconds, accessing the item in question requires me to pull out a step stool, drag it over, reach above the television, and set the piece right. 

Oh, and then I have to put the step stool away.

None of this is difficult and yet...the piece is still crooked.

Perhaps you think I'm incredibly lazy; sadly, I have zero evidence to rebut that hypothesis. Perhaps you're feeling a bit more kindly toward me and assume I'm too tired to do it -- but 24/7? Or maybe you're really giving me the benefit of the doubt and you've decided that I've grown to like the piece's crookedness, that it somehow adds panache or character to the wall and, by extension, to the room it's in.

That's really lovely of you. Thank you. 

Why is it that we put off doing seemingly simple things? The artwork of which I speak (created by my daughter in middle school, by the way) is only one example of several things in this house that would take me one minute or less to set right and yet they remain right where they are.

I'm not a scientist, but I'm kind of liking Newton's First Law of Motion as a fancy-schmancy explanation here: an object at rest remains at rest...unless acted on by an unbalanced force.

Yes, I had to look that up. And no, I don't know what an unbalanced force is. If you do, feel free to share it in the comments.

Maybe it's all that step stool dragging that's keeping me from taking action. Or maybe it's the fact that I forget all about it until I'm once again comfy in my chair. Or perhaps I suspect that the piece will only end up crooked again, so why bother?

I don't know. All I know right now is that I've expended more energy writing about the crooked artwork than it's going to take me to fix it. And, now that I've told you all about it, I'm going to pull out the step stool and fix it as soon as I finish typing this post.

I might not know much about the law of inertia, but I do know about peer pressure, so I know that disclosing this publicly makes me more likely to take action even if you'll never see the piece, crooked or otherwise.

Thank you. Now go fix that thing in your house. You'll thank me later.